Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  Billy spat at his shoes as he went past. He shouldn’t have. They were brown-and-white saddle shoes that Aunt Peg had helped him polish in preparation for the service.

  “I said I’d rabbit-punch you,” Billy said. He shouldn’t have said that.

  Ben went on down the steps without looking squarely at the other boy. He went nearly to the perimeter of light from the bulb above the church door. Among the fenders of Essexes, Fords, and Chevys he stopped and turned around. What he must do began to seem very clear to him. “Billy!” he called softly.

  Slowly, swaggeringly, Billy came down the steps toward him. “That dog died,” Billy said. “My dad found him down the draw from Stevenson’s barn. I saw him. I told you to leave him alone.” He shouldn’t have said that.

  “I don’t care,” Ben said. “I don’t care about a dog.”

  Ten feet away, Billy paused and eyed him suspiciously. “Well, you was sure taking on about it the other day. George said you went crazy about it. Maybe you’re crazy now. Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m going to go sit in the car where it’s cooler.”

  “Well, are you still mad?”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Well,” Billy said relaxing, “you shouldn’t have taken it so hard. People will think you’re crazy.”

  “Want to come sit in the car with me?” Ben asked breathlessly.

  “Naa. What for?”

  “To talk,” Ben said. He had nothing more to offer and he raged with the lack of bait, blaming that too on the boy he was going to kill, as if every deprivation and every threat had been embodied now in that droopy, unguarded figure confronting him.

  “I don’t want to talk,” Billy said.

  “I want to tell you something,” Ben pleaded. Tides of slime and revulsion sloshed in his head. Chastely, blaming all the filth on Billy, he said, “I heard Alberta peeing.”

  “Aw,” Billy said. His face remained stolid for a minute. Then he grinned and ambled forward. “Aw,” he said, “that’s nothing. I’ve heard grown-up women.”

  The vessel of all filth and stink and meanness followed him now up a lane smelling of fresh-cut weeds. Horned and hairy and poisonous as a toad, dripping with unmentionable nastiness.

  There. Delivered.

  “Hey,” Billy said when Ben tripped him. “Gawdam you, sneak,” he croaked when Ben kicked him in the head with his freshly shined shoes. He was on his knees squealing from the pain of his smashed nose when the poised Chevy rolled backward over him with Ben clinging in terror and glee to the steering wheel, hearing his own scream rise up toward the stars, mounting over the still trees around the church, circling gossamer and terrible and henceforward inescapable in the everlasting night.

  He was on the running board, riding the car down, when it smacked into Reverend Carlson’s Essex and stopped. The impact threw him onto the dusty grass and he lay there a minute on his back before he screamed again. Or yelled. Something had been torn free of his throat. It felt loosened. It felt like his own throat again.

  He lay there until he heard the sound of many feet running from the church. Then he rose shakily and watched them come. Now he knew them. He understood why they were coming. It all seemed very reasonable to him now. He had smashed his uncle’s car and another one. Probably they would punish him. He had not forgotten Billy and the dog, but now they seemed, both of them, quite unimportant.

  chapter 8

  WASHED IN THE BLOOD of Billy Kirkland, he was born again that night outside a country church in Kansas. And in the years to come what he could remember of his life before that night had always some quality of the incredible as well as the indefinite—as if it were some story told him by a forgotten tormentor who had not so much known the truth of fact as known the ways in which he could be moved to shivers and tears. Even the rash on his skin seemed like something told to him—and it sounded horrible—by someone about his own age who knew the cruelest way to tease.

  The rash had been nearly gone by the morning after Billy’s death, and with it had gone all that was definite in his mind about the killing.

  The county sheriff had come to his Uncle George’s home to question him before morning, of course, doing his mournful and bewildering duty the best he could. The sheriff was a taciturn, pudgy, grizzled man who had seen more trouble in the AEF than ever after his return to the prairies. He could not quite get his mind to close on the idea that a crime had been committed, nor could he be content to rest in the law’s compromise that no one of Ben’s age could commit a crime so vast. “We’ll all feel better if we know,” he said several times. He was never to have an assurance that might have restored his feeling about the world as a sensible place where a good man’s duty was clear.

  Ben might have wanted to help the sheriff. He wanted at first to help everyone know whence their grief had come and what it meant. At least he had no impulse to lie. He was not frightened by the sheriff’s presence or by the knowledge that Billy had been dead before anyone from the church got to him. That seemed too bad, but it seemed also dreadfully remote—something that had happened about the time of his father’s death, maybe. And of his father’s death he could not tell anyone very much, whatever his intention might be. Once he said, “These boys were going up to talk in the car.”

  “What boys?” the sheriff wanted to know. “It was just you and Billy, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It all happened in the dark,” Aunt Peg said. She was sitting on the front room sofa with Ben, her arm around his shoulders. Uncle George was sitting on the other side with his head resting in one large hand, staring at a curved shadow the table lamp cast on the rug. “You have to realize that the kind of boy Ben is, he’s more touched by this than even Billy’s parents. If he says he doesn’t remember something, he doesn’t remember. He’s had a bad week.”

  “He remembered having a fight with Billy on Fourth of July,” the sheriff said. “What I can’t understand is why, if you weren’t friends, you was going up to talk in the car together.”

  “Kids get over those things,” Peg said.

  “I remember it was about some dog,” Ben said, wondering. He could not recall how the dog had suffered under the bridge. He could not remember how those queer-looking blistered patches on his bare arms had itched only a few hours before. “He said he’d rabbit-punch me.”

  “Did he try to fight you tonight?” the sheriff asked. “Did he call you names? Was he chasing you?”

  “These boys were going up to the car to talk. I don’t know what they were going to talk about.” If he had known Billy Kirkland better, surely he’d have some idea of what Billy was interested in.

  “Now, Ben,” the sheriff said, “Billy’s mother and dad loved him just like your uncle and aunts love you, and they’ll feel better if they know just how it happened.”

  “Yes,” Ben said.

  The sheriff waited with sorrowful expectancy. “Yes what?” he prompted after a while.

  “I think they would,” Ben said. He wanted to cry because somewhere outside the lamplit circle of this room a boy was dead and his parents were mourning for him. Perhaps it was a situation that had been repeated on this night many times all over the world. “I wish you’d find out and tell them,” he said. “I wish I knew what happened.”

  “Can’t you let him sleep now?” Peg pleaded. “Hasn’t he been through enough already?”

  The sheriff nodded. “We’ve got to think there’s another boy and he’s dead. I’m not trying to be mean, ma’am.”

  “I wish it hadn’t of happened,” Ben said. Then he was crying, without strength to stop or strength to remember the best reason for his tears. Only it seemed too bad that there were dead boys somewhere and no one knew how it had happened.

  “Maybe he’ll remember more tomorrow,” the sheriff said. “I think you’re right. He don’t remember now. I don’t think he’s lying.”

  And of course the quality of rest he was now able to enjoy—now that Bill
y was murdered—might have restored him to the point at which he could have remembered all that they wanted (or didn’t want) to hear. His mind was formless and empty of intent as that of a well-nursed infant, ready to take the mold that was applied to it. At the same time, he was not an infant, and the substance of memory—all of it—lay in his mind waiting to be summoned to give this answer or that, depending on the next day’s requirements.

  If it had lain within the imagination of Green Rock, of Billy’s parents, the sheriff, or of those closest to him, to charge murder, he would in all likelihood have agreed to the charge.

  Changed so utterly, he was ready to say yes to anything. That was what his rebirth meant. In some strange way he was ready to begin life as whoever They said he was.

  Later it would seem unlikely that even Billy’s parents would have dared to conceive the actuality and call it by its right name. The loss of their son was enough for them to live with. Even in the initial shock some healing mildness would have cautioned them not to stir their fingers in horror beyond their capacity to stare at. They would have to call it an accident, just as the sheriff would, just as everyone would.

  And whether they would have “felt better” to know a few more details of how death came, they never had a chance to find out. By ten the next morning Peg had seen Green Rock’s only lawyer, had weighed as much as she needed to the legal risks involved in taking Ben out of the state.

  “We’re going to lose another one unless I get him away,” she said to Uncle George and Aunt Louise. “He can’t stand it. I know his mother and I know him. He’s not strong. And what the other kids will say to him, what they’ll always say. If he gets by a week, will he get by the next? I won’t let him stay to see.”

  “I suppose if he did a wrong, his own conscience will punish him,” Uncle George agreed.

  “Something’s punished him enough already,” Peg said. “Never any more. We’re going.”

  So at three that afternoon they were on an eastbound train, as much fugitives from the law as he was a murderer, neither ever to be determined because both to be forgotten, dropped away, every mile of flight becoming a creation of a life that somewhere had to be better.

  In a huge, threatful sunset they crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph that afternoon. Peg leaned on him as they both stared down from the train window at the brown, summery flood. On her reflection in the window he saw a faint, determined smile, saw it relax and soften as she said, “Tonight when you’re asleep we’ll cross the Mississippi. I’ve never been that far before. Ben, you don’t understand now, but we’re going to have a good life.” That promise was to herself as well as to him.

  It was as if she had always been waiting for exactly what had happened, for something large enough—however terrible it might be—to summon strength and intelligence and focus them on a clear necessity. A shrewd, sullen girl, Peg had sparred with life before Ben’s trouble. Raised in a loudly religious family, she had seen one older sister marry and go off to Africa as a missionary’s wife, then come home shattered with nothing to show for her zeal but an orphaned child and a head full of grotesquely fragmented pieties. Of no use ever again on this earth. She had seen her other sister, Louise, settle down to raising children in a small town, neither happy nor unhappy with her lot, but in a kind of default as if she could imagine nothing better.

  Peg had gone one year, herself, to a teachers’ college in the western part of the state, had learned few things there that impressed her as much as her distaste for the prospect of teaching. She liked children. She might have liked learning if it had not seemed to her so bloodless and stale.

  She might have married, after her year in college, though there was often a kind of sullen condescension in her manner that discouraged young men. And she was not pretty. She would have had to take what came along. So, instead, she had worked seven years for the Light and Power Company before that summer when something had to be done for Ben.

  Surely she was the one soul in Green Rock with depth and force enough to face squarely the monstrous impossibility of the fact. She did not know everything. She knew what she knew and, by her very denial, would affirm her knowledge that a fragile, promising child was a murderer. In some fashion that only time and consequence would explain, she must have welcomed the knowledge. At last there was something in her life large enough to unleash the woman she guessed herself to be. The smile that Ben saw reflected in the train window had about it some element of personal satisfaction, of anticipation. It was not for his deliverance alone that she gave thanks.

  In Kansas she had declared that he was already punished enough, meaning, if she meant to declare anything more than her wish for the future, that he had been punished in advance of his crime. She had closed the accounts with conscience, with the old conscience that dangled its streamers of living tissue into the caverns of the past.

  But this was not at all to say that conscience should have nothing to do with their lives in the future. It was simply that she had taken her terrible cue to write the year One on the calendar. She would make a life for them by choice rather than one smothered by the dictates of what had—who knows how long ago?—been fatally established.

  She had not much experience in what to choose. All the better. She had a keen Yankee eye for sound goods and for situations without upper limits. She settled them in a small apartment in Queens in which they lived through the war years. She worked, as long as she had to, in the accounting department of a hospital supply house. By the time the war ended and he was halfway through high school, she was in partnership with a woman named Bishop, running a camera and photographic supply store in Flushing. They had a house of their own by then.

  A lesser woman with the same determination to change her life in a strange big city might have gone in for adult education courses and other such ready-to-wear additions to the personality. Not Peg. All she had ever needed was the clear necessity of selecting for herself, of following leads that seemed good. She worked, she mothered Ben, she read a lot and made friends with people who improved over the years. She refused to have even the skeleton of her own past—the twenty-seven years of indecision and purposelessness—in their closet. In the city to which they had come, no one presented them with bills for life over with and done. Why pay out of some profitless remembrance of guilt? She was one of those for whom the city and wartime prosperity were perfectly suited. In what was there to be taken and used, she saw at last the reflection of her true identity.

  Ben remembered her during this time as tireless, always eagerly taking on additional work or play from the endlessly offered bounty around them. She was as quick to volunteer as hostess at the USO as to accept invitations for swimming or picnicking on the Long Island beaches, to take on overtime at the office as to run into Manhattan with friends for dinner or the shows she liked at Rockefeller Center. And it was likely that this tirelessness was not so much the sign of inordinate strength—though she was a strong woman—as from the lifting of neurotic handicaps. The incalculable duty she had assumed swept them off and gave her natural strength full play.

  Year by year she got better-looking. It was not merely that she dressed better. The habits of her mind and body changed and the old Kansas dowdiness faded like a memory of bad times. She was better-looking at forty than she had been at twenty-six.

  She mothered him conscientiously. No doubt in the beginning she was overprotective and overalert. Their new life was still precarious. The best of the choices open to her now was the freedom to choose correction of this fault. In a year or two when she saw—when she had learned how to see—that he was making good and normal headway, she loosened the apron strings and let him know it. Her own contentment and increasing poise were the best of what she had to give him. Her shrewdness in realizing this was the pin on which her success hinged.

  Only, wasn’t there some ineradicable shadow in this resurrection for which she deserved so much credit? For the easiest-breathing nights, the absence of bad dreams, t
he nonchalant freedom of fighting her hard when they quarreled (over his coming in late from a high-school party, smelling of bourbon though by no means drunk), standing up to her with a clear conscience in defense of his whims—like any other boy of his age and intelligence—for these privileges of normality wasn’t there some excess payment of gratitude, at least some rumor of debt that could absolutely never be silenced?

  In the end he thought so—and was happy to believe she had lost the ability to detect it. She married, at last, when he was in college. It was a sign of her faith that they had made it all the way, she and he, up from that graveyard where Billy Kirkland died to the height where neither would need the other’s guarantee that it had never really happened.

  She married well. If her first marriage had been to an enormous ghost of disorder, she had lain under that horror uncomplainingly until it was spent, vanquished by the sheer female loyalty she had paid it. She had earned her fun. Bill Capwell, who had worked through two other wives in his search for her, meant to see that she got it “on the sunset trail,” as he said good-naturedly of them both. He was a good sort—an electronics engineer and amateur, star-class yachtsman on the Sound, still of good appetite in his fifties and in love with Peg as if they were both adolescents.

  She died about eighteen months after her marriage. Death came without warning; she died of an embolism developing after an operation so commonplace that no one was worried.

  There was a superficially cruel irony in her death at forty-seven, so short a time after she had begun to live for herself instead of for Ben.

  Nevertheless he suspected she had died at the right time. Victory was more important for her than happiness. Happiness and leisure might have given her time to question her triumph. She had died still under military discipline, so to speak—in unquestioned obedience to the idea that human salvage can always be chosen. She might have looked back from the safe terrain of her happiness. She had brought them out of Kansas on terms that forbade looking back.